Book review: Religion 101: From Allah to Zen Buddhism, an Exploration of the Key People, Practices, and Beliefs That Have Shaped the Religions of the World, by Peter Archer

Discover the origins and traditions of world religions!With so many religions in the world, it isn’t always easy to recall each faith’s key influences, spiritual figures, and dogmas. Written in easy-to-understand language, “Religion 101” offers a fascinating–and memorable–glimpse at the sacred stories, traditions, and doctrines that have influenced today’s most popular religions. Goodreads

I think that there is a series of these 101 books that covers quite a range of diverse topics, obviously with different authors too. My first venture into these Crash Course series was about Psychology, and I can tell you that it was boring. I know that at the end of the day, the book was only an introduction, but the Psychology 101 is just too boring and too basic. So, when I picked this book up, I’m not entirely sure why. Knowing that the first experience was not to my advantage, I can only assume the second one was not going to be that much different. But, I thought, hey the author is different, the topic is different, so surely the experience is going to be different too, right? Well, yeah, kind of.

When you spend all your life being a Moslem, or a Christian, or a Buddhist, or <insert any other religion and/or belief here>, it’s obviously not recommended for you to be judging about other people’s beliefs. You have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to say that their certain practices aren’t logical (I have a friend who told me that religions aren’t suppose to be logical all the time, because it is not science), or wrong or whatever; heck, you yourself might not know a lot about your own religion. So, going from there I decided to hit myself with a crash course on religion. You have to start somewhere before you delve deeper into topics (or in this case a religion) of your interest. Other than that, it’s always interesting to see what other people (who I assume is not a Moslem) wrote about Islam.

Well, if ever you have an interest like I do, this book is not a bad place to start. This was well written (and I mean, written simply so as not to deter you from reading further because the lingo is just too confusing) and it gives you the basic initial information you needed to know about the five major religions. Granted that this book did not cover ALL beliefs, but hey it’s not like you’re pretty stock up on your knowledge of the five major religions already, so why complain, right? I think it would even be interesting to have read this book while having a friend who actually practice the religion itself for you to ask questions or just simply to ask your friend to elaborate further on the things that you didn’t quite understand.

Overall, this was quite an okay book. I think for the most part, it is something that you can actually google yourself without having to own this book, but if you’re lazy, wouldn’t it be better to have it all in one book than to have to google it one by one?

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆

Title: Religion 101: From Allah to Zen Buddhism, an Exploration of the Key People, Practices, and Beliefs That Have Shaped the Religions of the World